LISNews Goes Wireless and Bill Drew Promotes LibraryLookup to His Users.
Bill Drew:
“I am pleased to announce the creation of a new blog for and about Libraries with WLANs, LISnews.Com: Wireless at http://wireless.lisnews.com. I am proud of the fact that Blake Carver believes this is important enough to set up this special section of LISNEWS. It is also available via RSS feed. The feed can be found on the above website.
Initially LISnews.Com: Wireless blog will be used for news and announcements on WLANs and libraries. This will include additions to the Wireless Librarian website. the LibWireless list will continue as a vehicle to provide discussion and support. There will be overlap between the two. Where it goes from there depends on how it is used and what kind of comments and stories are sent to me. I will be including stories from the computer press on general articles about WLANs and WiFi as well as articles targeted at libraries.”
I also want to highlight Bill's Advanced Information Tools page that he put together for SUNY Morrisville College Library users. I'd like to see more libraries offer bookmarklets and actually promote them.
“I have created a page I am calling 'Advanced Information Tools.' It contains bookmarklets for various types of searches including our OPAC. Before I announce it to our students, faculty, and staff, I would like some input on its potential usefulness as well as the potential value of the bookmarklets on it. I am hoping to eventually have a IE toolbar for our library that on it that the user can add to his/her browser with pulldown menus, a search box for our OPAC, and other useful items. IE is the campus standard and is on the laptops used by our students.”
Bill is in search of one of my holy grails, a library-based toolbar. We don't seem to have made any progress on this front, although Jon Udell, Art Rhyno, and others have done much with bookmarklets. So here's yet another request going out to any programmers who can help with creating such a beast. We could sure use it, and so could you. [The Shifted Librarian]